For hundreds and hundreds of years, Indonesia has been a crucial part of the global trading system, connected to both Asian and European empires. Its far-flung geography and highly differentiated population groups have made it uniquely susceptible to foreign influences that drew it into the capitalist world system that began to emerge in the sixteenth-seventh centuries. Its importance today can hardly be exaggerated - it was the primary generator of the 'Asian flu' that laid low economies across East Asia in the late 1990s, and it has now become a centre for Islamist politics and social...